"Shooting in 3-D. We're not converting," star Lerman told us last week during the run up to the MTV Movie Awards. "We're really going to be popping out at you.... We're using the Jim Cameron technology and all that. It's going to be nuts. It's going to look really cool. And trust me, from everything I've seen, it's going to blow people away."

There's no set start date for shooting, though producers have an eye on a 2011 release date. For now, Lerman is busy training for the role of d'Artagnan, the young risk-taker who dreams of becoming one of the famed Musketeers.

"I just started two weeks ago and it's pretty intense learning the fencing," Lerman said. "Just hours in the gym every day. It's an intense process."

The training process, it seems, is rather more intense than the casting process. Coming off his turn as the sword-swinging son of Poseidon in "Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief," Lerman didn't even have to submit to a formal audition.

"It was the weirdest process for me, because usually there is a process," he told us. "Usually you go through auditions and you really try to fight for the role. But they came to me and they were just really invested in the idea that I can do it. I met with Paul and we hit it off and we were like, 'Yeah, let's make an awesome film together."

The movie is expected to stay true to the swashbuckling soul of the classic novel while infusing the story with a contemporary sensibility and the visual effects with the latest tech Hollywood has to offer. But will there be a radio-friendly single to accompany the flick, as there was for the 1993 version starring Charlie Sheen, Kiefer Sutherland, Chris O'Donnell? Who can forget that #1 Billboard single, "All for Love" — which doesn't exactly hold up almost two decades later — courtesy of Bryan Adams, Rod Stewart and Sting?

"I haven't heard anything, but it'd be cool," laughed Lerman. "I gotta pitch that one now. A new theme song."